


Spiralling Out, Spiralling In

by Lobelia321



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-24
Updated: 2006-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lobelia321/pseuds/Lobelia321
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eldon had lived so long in a place with no straight lines, he found his own home city hard to remember.  So he took to following McKay around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiralling Out, Spiralling In

**Author's Note:**

> Another writing experiment. A link at the end explains what I was trying to do, for those who are interested. :-)

_**FIC: "Spiralling Out, Spiralling In" (SGA)**_  
Title: Spiralling Out, Spiralling In  
Author: Lobelia.  
Fandom: SGA.  
Summary: Eldon had lived so long in a place with no straight lines, he found his own home city hard to remember. So he took to following McKay around.  
Rating: 15.  
Spoilers: 2.05, 'Condemned'.  
Length: c. 4,000 words.  
Pairing: Eldon / Rodney McKay.  
Pics: [ Eldon/McKay](http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s2/205/html/stargate5082.html) and [ more Eldon/McKay](http://www.stargatecaps.com/sga/s2/205/html/stargate5130.html).  
Author notes: Another writing experiment. A link at the end explains what I was trying to do, for those who are interested. :-)

 **SPIRALLING OUT, SPIRALLING IN**  
by Lobelia

 **Spiralling out**

•  
The sky was the strangest thing of all the strange things in Atlantis. Eldon just couldn't get used to it, no matter how often he glimpsed it.

Back on the Island, the sky had been white at night, white with stars. Only pin pricks of black space had pierced the carpet of stellar light. Here in Atlantis, you never really saw the stars. There was so much light coming out of the City, brilliant hard light, soft humming light, yellow light that made dots dance in front of your eyes. It turned everything bright, not just the corridors and plazas of the City. It drowned out the night sky.

Still, Eldon only looked in glances. The sky had been a thing of terror for so long, he couldn't bring himself to gaze at it for any length of time. Bad things always came from above. It was wisest to stay under cover.

  
•  
Atlantis was stranger than strange yet it shouldn't have been. He had used to live in a city, hadn't he? He had used to walk streets of stone; he had commuted along metal tracks; he had bought things with paper vouchers. But it had been so long ago, and Olesia... surely, Olesia had not been like this strange City of the Ancients? Surely, there had been more of an outside to Olesia, not just these cramped balconies with the wind ever roaring round the spires and the ocean crashing against the breakwaters far, far below? Surely, in Olesia, there had been groves and squares, parks, canopies of leaves, fountains playing against the background of growling traffic?

But Eldon had lived so long in a place with no straight lines, he found his own home city hard to remember.

Hard to believe.

  
•  
The people living in Atlantis looked at the newcomer strangely. They didn't know what to make of him, whether to categorise him as mentally unhinged or as emotionally elated. His nervous tics and sideways eyes were not easily readable. And despite knowing that he had been imprisoned unlawfully, the scent of the convict hung about him like a cloud of flies.

Most avoided him, and this was fine by Eldon. The people here were kind but their kindness confused him. When one of them came up to him with outstretched arms, he instinctively cowered. He'd been hit too often to be comfortable around physical display.

  
•  
"I think," said the resident psychotherapist, "that he has been through some considerable trauma. I can't get all that much out of him, he is reluctant to speak and remains gripped by dissociative stress. But you must remember that he was torn from his normal environment and dumped in a penal colony, a penal colony without guards or turnkeys or controls of any kind. Violence was rife there. From my work with high-security facilities on Earth I know that ritual humiliation is endemic in such places, as is rape and bodily injury, all in the service of preserving a strict pecking order. He lived there for over ten years, as far as I understand. It's bound to leave libidinal traces."

"The patient does not like to be examined," said the chief medical surgeon of the City, "so I didn't want to subject him to anything unnecessary. He gets especially upset if you try to touch him; even giving him the basic inoculations was a trial for the poor lad. But even so, I can tell that he has suffered quite a few blows and beatings, judging from the bruises and scars on his back and chest, lacerations, burn marks, some of them fresh, some of them several years old. I couldn't make any definite statement about anal penetration without closer examination and, as I've said, I really don't wish to force this on the patient at the moment. Perhaps later, when he has become a bit more acclimatised."

"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Eldon," the civilian leader of the expedition to Atlantis told the lone Olesian. "We have sent a communication device to your planet and it is very unlikely that there have been any survivors after the recent Wraith culling. When the Wraith discovered that the penal colony which had furnished them with food for these past 200 years had been dissolved, they descended on the cities of Olesia. I fear, Eldon, that the only survivors of your people are those who escaped from the prison island. They now live on one of our Alpha sites but we have as yet been unable to establish contact. Please think about whether you would like to join them. I understand you will need some time alone now."

"Torrell wasn't the worst of them," Eldon said. "The one... who was there before... The magistrates had to remove him. He was killing so many of us... so many of the prisoners. There weren't enough of... us left over for the Wraith."

"They...," Eldon said, "are not my people."

  
•  
The Olesian ex-convict was confused by the different types of persons co-habiting on the planet of Atlantis. He was introduced to members of the tribe of the Athosians; it was expected that he would feel comfortable with them as they were from his own galaxy. He was also made acquainted with an individual from Sateda who had survived the culling of his home planet by the Wraith; it was assumed that he would empathise as he was now in a similar situation himself.

The Olesian did not feel close to the Athosians nor to the Satedan. His own planet had not enjoyed trade relations or interplanetary exchange of any kind for close to two hundred years. Athosians, Satedans, and Terrans, all seemed equally alien to the Olesian.

The Olesian took to following McKay around. McKay understood about firing up ignition mechanisms.

  
•  
Dr Rodney McKay entered the laboratory in the South Wing after a breakfast of coffee and cereal bars. The coffee lined his stomach with an acidic sensation. The cereal bars left residue between his molars. On the counter top next to the mainframe lay a leather thong.

Dr McKay picked up the artefact.

It was roughly ten inches long and made of three separate leather strips plaited together. Woven into the pattern were five pebbles. The pebbles were not round, but jagged. They gave off a faint sulphuric scent.

"Radek!" Dr McKay called out to his colleague. "Has that crazy Olesian been in here again?"

  
•  
"The... stones are pieces of... ore," said the Olesian.

"The stuff you used to make explosives? And weapons, detonators, all that armoury?"

"Yes. I thought... you could perhaps use it to develop more weapons here. It is probably not useful, the ore was very poor in quality, and... I have only very limited... skill but it is an extremely volatile..."

"Yes, yes," interrupted Dr McKay. "Can I take this? I need to make analyses, take electronic samples. We should put this through the hyperfuge. Radek! Now if we-- good god. I've just thought of something."

  
•  
MEMO  
From: R. McKay  
To: E. Weir  
Re: Olesian ore

After extensive tests (hyperfuge, electromagnetoscope, controlled explosions, interface with the Ancient devices, frangibility, incendiariness), I have to conclude that the ore samples brought back from Olesia act as potent combustion agents and can be harnessed to provide ammunition for a variety of very powerful fire arms, short range missiles and cannon-type weapons (Lt. J. Sheppard agrees with me on this). Eldon the Olesian has helped to generate some of the explosions we tested and knows where the ore can be mined.

I propose that we send teams in through the Gate to the former prison island. The area has now been helpfully cleared for us by the Wraith, and if we can mine enough of this stuff to use for bombs etc., that would be extremely invaluable. I'm also working on civil uses, e.g. to supplement existing power sources. This ore is a great resource.

  
MEMO  
To: Dr Rodney McKay  
From: Dr Elizabeth Weir  
Date: 15-42-2006

 _Your memo on Olesian ore_

Thanks for the good work on this, Rodney. I'm afraid Olesia is still a no-go zone. Until we get the all-clear from military recon, there can be no mining expeditions to Olesia. Do keep working on the ore samples you have, though, and keep me informed.

I'm also glad to see that you're taking Eldon under your wing. He needs some guidance and friendship.

  
MEMO  
From: RM  
To: EW  
Re: O. ore

I am not a chicken. Nobody is under my wing. We need more ore samples.

  
•  
One morning, McKay walked into the lab and did not recognise the man standing next to the microwave generator.

"Good... morning," said the man and looked three inches to the left of McKay's right ear.

"Oh," said McKay. "It's you. I didn't recognise you. Where's that leather cap of yours?"

"The Athosian woman... cut my hair. And I... shaved."

There was an area of pale skin along the Olesian's jaw and across his upper lip. The rest of his face was as swarthy as before. Razor nicks graced the fresh skin. A thick pink scar formed a perfect ricrac pattern on his chin.

The Olesian caught McKay staring and touched his chin. "It's... old," he said. "It's... long forgotten."

He didn't really have a stammer. He paused before words but he did not stutter.

  
•  
"Where is Rodney?"

"Holed up with that little Olesian chappie."

"Again? What do they _do_ in all those hours? Build nuclear bombs? Or just talk techno-gibberish?"

"I think it's lovely that the Olesian has made a friend. It's made him much more self-confident and comfortable with people. When he came in for his last check-up, he even allowed me to feel his chest."

"Oooh. Can you feel mine, too?"

"Get away with you."

  
•  
The planet was large and very round. It had a slight tilt along its axis, and its poles, north and south, bulged into ovoids. Most of its surface was covered in water, saline oceans with restless waves transversing longitudes and latitudes.

Not far from the planet's single continent lay the insular metropolis that humanoids had built. It had been there for but a fraction of the planet's lifetime, and the planet barely felt its presence. Tornadoes, yes. Quakes deep beneath the sea, yes. The pull of its star, directing it along its preordained arc from season to season, absolutely yes.

Still, though. Sometimes momentous events could be tiny. The lichen that had pushed its way, increment by increment, across those ancestral rocks and caused the bloom of oxygen: tiny and momentous. The hole in space that lingered like a prick in time until, one day, those humanoids slipped a finger through it and opened a door to the worlds: tiny, momentous, unpredictable.

The more recent wave of anthropoids, that small tribe of bipeds, crawling through the tunnels of their own making on their metal-and-glass island: what import did they have on the celestial dance of the planet? What were their small passions compared to the tow of gravity or the adventure of orbit?

Yet: Tiny. Momentous.

Unpredictable.

  
•  
The biped with the receding hairline stands on the balcony, silhouetted against the setting celestial body.

The other biped with the pronounced philtrum walks out onto the balcony with hesitant steps.

A gradient wind blows parallel to the isobar. Rayleigh scattering colours the air particles red.

The biped with the receding hairline turns to face the other member of his species and makes a comment about current climatological conditions and how they might affect the efficacy of explosive matter.

The other biped advances towards his interlocutor. He stands still for one and a half seconds. He is shorter than his colloquist by the length of two metacarpals. This means that he has to bend his neck in order to direct his optical attention up towards his companion's visage. He lowers his head and presses its crown to his co-humanoid's chest.

The taller biped's facial muscles move in staccato jolts.

The shorter biped does not move.

The taller biped expresses discomfiture with the situation and launches into a disquisition on the inappropriateness of excessive physical contact, the probability of anthropological incompatibility, the atomic weight of phosphate and the need to overcome the internalised subordination rituals of a felons' society. All of this is communicated in a rushed and at times ungrammatical fashion.

The former inmate of a felons' society places his right hand against his conversation partner's pubis.

Speech ceases.

The shorter biped drops to his knees and exhales carbon dioxide onto the woven polymer fabric covering his fellow male's genital area.

The biped with the receding hairline executes a 45-degree rotation with his raised left hand. His mouth opens and closes thrice in quick succession. His eye lids fall shut.

Vasocongestion takes place. The Terran's hand remains suspended in mid-revolution.

Crepuscular rays arch across the sky and converge on the opposite horizon. On the underside of the balcony's railings, lichen has begun to grow.

  
 **Spiralling in**

•  
A number of machines were on all the time in the South Wing laboratory. They produced constant radiation levels but not of a degree harmful to humans. Others were switched on every morning by the lab team and put to sleep at night. Certain pieces of apparatus were reserved for special occasions only. If there had been dust on Atlantis, it would have accumulated on the dials of the naphthometer kept in a storage room off corridor B2.

"What we're going to do," Dr Rodney McKay, Head of the Physics & Engineering Lab Group, said, "is test every mineral aggregate we've been able to find, off-world and on-world, for degree of ductility and pyrotechnic preference. And after that, we're going to combine the most promising aggregates with minute quantities of this Olesian stuff and see where that gets get us. It's like damn homeopathy but what can we do."

"You mean," said Eldon, the Olesian firearms builder, "if it explodes... we are happy?"

"Very happy," said Dr Rodney McKay. "Okay, Radek and Optican, you start on the orthosilicates. I'll calibrate the naphtha levels. And your job, Eldon, is to tell me exactly when there's a reaction and how it's similar or not similar to what you're used to with your Olesian ores."

"Yes. Yes... Rodney."

  
•  
At first, the Olesian had called him nothing. Just looked at him with an ovine expression. After a while, he'd cottoned on to what the others were saying, and he'd started addressing him as 'Rodney'. "No, no," Dr McKay had said, "you should call me 'Dr McKay'. If you're going to be my so-called lab assistant or whatever, that's what you're going to have to call me."

"Yes. Yes... Dr McKay."

"Now, what about you? Are you just, what was it again? Adlon? Is that your surname or what?"

"Surname?"

"You don't have those? Like, you know, Teyla Emmagen, Ronon Dex, all of you people in this galaxy, you have a first name and a surname, don't you?"

"I am... just Eldon. Or on the Island, I was also... Number 387 dash 58 hyphen 6. You can... call me that if you want."

"What? Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going to call you by some number, that's totally absurd."

"If the number is... too long to remember, I have it branded on my... arm."

But Dr McKay hadn't wanted to take a look at the Olesian's arm nor had he been interested in memorising the former convict's ID. "Forget that," he'd said. "I'll call you Adlon. Now, if you could just tell me again what precisely is the melting point for this mineral because I need to work out how to simulate in the lab the conditions of what you're calling your kiln fires and underground smelting caves and whatnot."

"Eldon," said the Olesian. "Eldon."

"And you," said Dr McKay, "just call me Rodney."

  
•  
The facial hair had grown back after a few days. Clearly, the crazy Olesian was not too fond of shaving, and not too good at it, either, judging from all the cuts he'd given himself first time round. So the fuzz grew into a five o'clock shadow, and then into a ten o'clock stubble, and then into the short, rather scruffy beard he'd had back when the Atlanteans first met him. It was sort of scraggly along his cheeks and jaw but thick around the chin which was a good thing because it covered up that scar, and that scar had been unsettling. Delicate, pink, so meticulously zigzagged it had to have been done deliberately. The wonder of it was that hair grew on that fleshy skin at all.

Another thing that was unsettling was the man's habit of putting his head against one's chest. Sort of like a butting billy goat. It was embarrassing, and it was humiliating, and the more one kept yelling at him, the more he tended to do it. And there had to be quite a bit of yelling because the idiot was always tinkering with equipment that he shouldn't be tinkering with, and sticking bits of kit onto completely unrelated machinery, and twiddling and fiddling with knobs and levers and dials as if they were meccano toys.

And then he was always bringing presents along. Well, not always. He ran out of them pretty soon; after all, he'd escaped with the shirt on his back and literally almost nothing else. But he appeared to have secreted a ton of stuff about his person, beads and thongs and bracelets and bits of stone and potsherds and lengths of string and fragments of metal tubing twisted into propeller shapes and a tiny gadget that he called a 'fear measurer' and which was intended to be some kind of a Wraith detector. He got yelled at for cluttering up the lab with all this low-tech junk but in response to the yelling, he'd always do the head-butting thing, and how could one talk rationally to a person who behaved in such a totally unhinged manner?

He had a mean intuition for figuring out explosive trajectories, though. Credit where it's due.

Crazy as a coot, of course.

  
•  
"You are... brave. And wise, and... kind."

"Nonsense," Rodney McKay snapped at his lab assistant. (Snapping because he was strangely moved.) "Listen. This has got to stop. This is not how we do things around here. This disrupts professional lab routine. And while it was fascinating to, ah, visit your quarters and inspect your 'robotics'..." (Pile of junk, like the garage of some hobby-inventor, might as well try and build a space ship out of match sticks; in fact, he practically had, the lunatic.) "...it is impossible for me to come and do that again."

"You... did not like it?"

"No! I did not. I mean..." Noting the other's facial expression. "no! I did, I liked it, all right, it was fine." (I was surprised into it! You tricked me, you overwhelmed me, I would never, normally, ever...) "It's just that we _do not do that_ around here. This is not a prison, I'm not your superior or anything like that. Well, I _am_ your superior but only professionally." (Intellectually! Mentally! Civilisationally!) "In other things, we're equal, and actually, this is a tremendously embarrassing conversation that I do not really want to be having with an off-world Neanderthal and god, will you please get your head off my chest?"

In truth, Rodney McKay was already hard inside his standard-issue lab uniform trousers. Which was the most embarrassing fact of all.

  
•  
"The magnesium phosphate compound was... the closest thing to the kinds of materials I... used to make explosions on the Island. I always..."

"Of course. That is exactly what I predicted. Listen, Eldon. I feel very bad about the other evening, on your balcony. I wanted to say that, well, that--"

"...added a little sulphur to... the ore, and then I fired it up in the kiln for a week or so. Five large fires usually..."

"What? You had no way of measuring the exact temperature? How the hell are we going to reproduce that under controlled conditions? But about the other thing, I--"

"...were enough to... generate the right heat. I can make the fires here, just like I used to and then you... can measure them."

"I feel-- Crap, Eldon, I feel I owe you one."

"We can use one of those... thermometer things."

"You make me out to be some sort of prison ward ogre who exploits his minions but this is not, _not_ the kind of person I am, even though others might tell you otherwise but really, in seriousness, I cannot let this just--"

"It wasn't so bad. I got... used to it. And I didn't get culled."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"I like being... here. I like building the... devices, and the ore testing. I can be of great... use, in all sorts of ways."

"Look, you stupid oaf."

"If it is not... safe in the City, we could light the fires on the mainland."

"Just let me-- How do you unfasten these goddamn pants of yours?"

  
•  
After Eldon's advance on him, Rodney had been suffused with horror, humiliation and shame.

It had been so sudden. But that was no excuse, he knew it wasn't. He had allowed himself to be put in the position of slave driver. So he had become possessed of the need for expiation.

All that yelling, too. The humiliation of yelling and being thanked for it with eyes of devotion.

But now Rodney realised that yelling was nothing. Yelling was not sticks and stones, not blade on bones. Not razor slices into delicate muscle.

Rodney, on his knees in front of Eldon, did not know what to do with his hands.

He didn't dare touch Eldon's cock. The flesh was covered in pocked marks, a relief map of nipples, a pattern of pain. Rodney's balls and cock shrank in bodily empathy.

He braced a hand tentatively on Eldon's thigh but here, too, the skin was scarified.

Anywhere else but here.

Nowhere else.

Rodney touched Eldon with his tongue only. He made the tip of his tongue soft and wet. He exerted no pressure. He licked Eldon's cock with the daintiness of a cat.

The underside, too, was covered in tiny nicks.

Even with his eyes closed, Rodney saw blood running down Eldon's legs.

Is this how they kept you? Is this the price you paid? Pet monkey to the head guy, keep blowing things up and they'll let you live.

  
•  
The sky was the strangest thing about the Pegasus Galaxy, with its shifting constellations and auroras of jade. The sky and the clear eyes of Eldon. Bright with curiosity, dark with dark lust. It was the mix that Rodney couldn't get used to, how somebody so wrecked and so scarred could shine so enthusiastically and love so unreservedly.

Nor had Rodney known that beneath tears there could be tenderness, and beneath tenderness the brilliant hum of discovery.

Oh, to drown in your stars, Atlantis.

  
•  
The End.  
All original parts of this story © to Lobelia.  
24 April 2006

[ Author notes](http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/441263.html?replyto=3546799).

This page: http://archiveofourown.org/works/184374 


End file.
